I have double-digit certifications. Security+. Network+. Linux+. Cisco tracks. VMware. CompTIA. The stack of them. I earned every one, and I’m not embarrassed by a single badge on that wall.
I’m also not going to tell you they prove I can do the job.
That isn’t false modesty, and it isn’t me dunking on the industry I teach in. It’s the most useful thing I know about credentialing — and the vendors just quietly admitted it.
Watch what AWS did, not what AWS says
Here’s the tell.
If certifications were working — if a badge reliably meant “this person can operate a cloud environment” — then the smartest move for a hyperscaler would be to print more badges. More exams, more certified bodies, more revenue. Problem solved.
Instead, AWS built a training institute aimed squarely at the cloud skills gap. They published hundreds of free courses — the number they cite is 600-plus — and then, tellingly, spent real money on apprenticeships: earn-while-you-learn programs with mentors in the room. The UK program just hit its thousandth apprentice. Microsoft and Google restructured their catalogs the same way, away from product-by-product exam lists and toward role-based pathways.
Read that as a confession. If free content plus a passing score were enough, none of that infrastructure would be necessary. They built the apprenticeship layer because they already know what every hiring manager learns the hard way: the exam proves you showed up. It doesn’t prove you can perform.
Why the badge stopped meaning what we wanted it to
Certifications were never a lie. They’re a signal. They tell you someone is willing to study a body of knowledge, sit an exam, and keep the credential current. That’s real, and it isn’t nothing.
But somewhere along the line we started treating a signal as proof. A signal only works while it’s scarce, or while it’s hard. And once a certification becomes the price of entry — “CCNA required” — everybody gets one, because the filter demands it. When everybody has one, it stops distinguishing anybody.
That’s not dilution by failure. That’s dilution by success. The badges did their job so well that we all bought one, and now the signal is noise.
The industry has a phrase for the result: certified, not qualified. Everyone in this field has met the person who passed every exam and freezes when the production environment catches fire.
The bottleneck isn’t content. It’s trust.
This is the part the “skills gap” conversation keeps getting wrong. We talk like we have a supply problem — as if people can’t find the material. You can’t swing a keyboard without hitting a free cloud course. The content is solved.
What isn’t solved is trust. A hiring manager with a six-figure salary on the line and an outage clock running has no reliable way to know whether the person in front of them can debug a broken IAM policy at two in the morning while the meter runs forty thousand dollars a minute. A certificate doesn’t answer that. Neither does a résumé, or a list of completed courses.
So the market is doing what markets do: it’s inventing a workaround. Employers are quietly moving toward a three-part signal — certification, plus apprenticeship or on-the-job evidence, plus a portfolio of things built and broken and fixed. Each part answers a different question:
- The certification says “knows the vocabulary.”
- The apprenticeship says “has been in the room when it went wrong.”
- The portfolio says “here is the proof — look at it yourself.”
Take two away and you’re guessing.
What I’d tell you to do with that
If you’re building a career: stop collecting badges like they’re the destination. They’re the entry ticket, not the thing that earns trust. Get the cert that opens the door, then go get the middle layer — the lab, the internship, the messy project nobody assigned you, the thing you built and had to fix at 2 a.m. That’s the layer employers are starving for, and it’s the layer nobody can sell you. You have to do it.
If you’re an employer: stop asking “what certifications do you hold” and start asking “what have you broken, and what did you do about it?” The wall doesn’t tell you. The story does.
If you’re building training — which I am — the whole game is assessment integrity. The reason the vendors can’t solve this at scale is that you cannot mass-produce proof of competence. You can mass-produce content. You can mass-produce exams. You cannot mass-produce the moment a person stands in a live environment that’s on fire and has to think. Any training business built on “pass the cert” is selling the thing that just got commoditized down to zero. The business worth building is the one that certifies competence — scenario-based, live, assessed by someone who’d know if you faked it.
That’s the whole idea. A badge is a promise someone made. Capability is the promise kept.
I’m not anti-certification. I have double-digit certifications, and I’ll get more. I’m against substitution — against handing a hiring manager a wall of badges and letting him believe that’s the same thing as knowing whether I can do the work.
He deserves to know the difference. So do I.